When Your Partner Isn’t Giving You the Support You Need | Women at Work | Podcast

0:01Jennifer Petriglieri:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more.

0:38Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Bernstein. I'm Amy Gallo. If you've been listening to our show for a while or reading our newsletter, you know that we regularly ask listeners and readers to tell us about the workplace challenges they're facing. And this one particular email landed in our inbox recently about a dilemma that we think is very relatable and yet rarely discussed.

1:23The woman who wrote that email gave us permission to read it out loud. Here it goes. Hello. I'm not sure this has been covered before, but I personally am being challenged in a way that may be an issue for others as well. It's difficult to get my husband to wholeheartedly support my career and its development. He's an excellent partner, we make a great team, and he absolutely intends to be supportive. But when I face additional demands for my job, he tends to grumble a bit about the longer hours or extra stress I'm experiencing. And then she gives some background about her career and family life.

1:59She's in biotech, working in research and development. She and her husband have been married for seven years and have two kids. He's an attorney and earns a higher salary than she does, but her total compensation package is larger and includes a family health insurance. After their first baby, she switched from the technical scientist track to program management in order to have greater control over her schedule and be able to work from home more often. I'm not underpaid, underappreciated, or unhappy in my career, she writes. We generally communicate openly and well. There's never been an expectation or desire for me to be a stay-at-home parent, yet if I need to travel for a day or two or if I need to work past 5 p.m., he grouses.

2:43She goes on to say that when she's earned promotions in the past, they've discussed how to manage the additional demands together. He still doesn't seem to understand how to support my career development, she continues, which can make me feel as though he's being dismissive. I'm wondering if it's a result of some unconscious bias. His own mother never desired or pursued a career outside the home and cared for him and his sister full time. He also works in a different field, which makes it difficult to contextualize struggles I'm facing in a way that he can easily grasp. She gave an example, too, right?

3:18She sure did. Here it is. I recently expressed discontent with decisions made by leadership and shared my concerns with my husband, wanting to talk through my approach for responding appropriately in the office. He did not offer any guidance, support, or commiseration, but responded with concerned questions about whether I would leave my job and reduce our household income. I'll keep quoting her. I always employ strategies to garner his support for business trips or late work events, including coordination with family or friends to ensure he has a hand with child care while I'm gone if he needs it.

3:54He still fusses. And so now she's stepping into a leadership role, supporting a department, and that's about to require even more travel. I'm not sure how to get him to buy in, and that makes me nervous as I gear up to take on even more responsibility. Let me know if you'd like more information or a few of material that already addresses this. I'd love to see it. Thanks, Rebecca. Ugh, this is a problem I think so many of us can relate to, or at least parts of it. You know, HBR has published a fair amount of advice for dual career couples, a lot of it by NCED professor Jennifer Petriglieri. She's been on our show before in our season one episode, Couples That Work, which is also the title of her book.

4:40Right. And that episode embraced the fact that the people we love have a big impact on us professionally. Jennifer was also describing an ideal, mutually supportive relationship and how to achieve it. she wasn't so much talking about what...

4:57Jennifer Petriglieri:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more.

5:34Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Falling short looks and feels like. And so hearing about Rebecca's situation to me is validating. And having her on the show along with Jennifer is even better. We're going to learn from both of them about how to handle career family tension, especially when it's the first time you've faced it or are ready to acknowledge and deal with it.

6:15Jen and Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us. I'm really excited to take part in this conversation today. It's great to be here. Thanks for having us. So let me start with you, Jen. In studying dual-career couples, you identified three phases of their lives where tension tends to surface. Would you say Rebecca is in the first phase? Yeah, absolutely. So the first phase is really the phase where we work out how to be interdependent. If we think about our lives before we get together, we have these independent lives, independent careers. and when we initially get together we're still relatively independent right we have our careers running our families our friends and then something happens that means we really need to combine those tracks and I think in Rebecca's case I don't want to speak for her but I think it's probably the arrival of your children I think you have two children Rebecca and they're fairly young and for any of us who've had children myself included it's a huge transition and it really means we have to work together as a team and not just on the practical things, but also really figuring out what does it mean to be a couple?

7:21How are we going to support each other? How are we going to be as parents, as workers and careers? And there's a lot of things to untangle at that phase. And it feels like Rebecca's right in the middle of that tangle and trying to sort of make it work, really. Do you relate to that, Rebecca? I absolutely relate to that. I think the pandemic hitting right when our oldest was about 18 months old really exacerbated the pressures that come along with that first transition. So rather than simply how do we make this work as parents, as a couple in our career, there was this added layer of how do we make everything work?

8:02How do we make a trip to the grocery store work? How do we make remote work happen? At this point, I was still going into the office to work in the lab a few days a week and then analyzing data and writing reports at home. So we really needed to figure out how to function as a family in that situation. And then the decision to have a second child in the midst of all of this was a bold choice. Obviously, we wouldn't have it any other way. But there's a lot of moving pieces in that transition for sure. Yeah. And I think, Rebecca, your experience is so similar to the couples that the pandemic, it didn't change things per se, but it upped the ante, right?

8:49It amplified everything that was going on. It created this spotlight with a huge amount of pressure. And I think, first of all, congratulations on the second child. What a wonderful gift. But it's really interesting because it's very often the arrival of the second child that really makes things more difficult, right? Because one, you can sort of juggle between you. Two, not so much. You know, I had a child long before the pandemic. And I have to say, when she was born in the first year, I thought to myself, this is the most unfeminist thing I've ever done. And I don't mean that, you know, having the child, but I mean that it was all of a sudden societal expectations and the expectations within my marriage were that I would carry all of the load.

9:35And I just thought, wait, wait, wait, how did this come to be? All the work we've done to advance women and advance women's careers, like how is that all of a sudden out the window because I have this baby in my arms? I'm sorry, but something you just said, Amy, I want to sort of bounce it over to.

9:53Jennifer Petriglieri:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more.

10:30Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Rebecca, you said that the expectations in your marriage were that you would carry the load. Was that true of your marriage, Rebecca? To a certain extent, yes. I mean, I nursed both of our babies. So you sort of set that expectation right from the beginning that this tiny little being is attached to you pretty much constantly.

11:10And then you're the one waking up in the middle of the night constantly for it. So figuring out how to transition away from that as you can share feeding responsibilities and figuring out how to equitably share parenting roles when it's so clear that when one person is nursing, it just seems so normal for that to be the go-to person for everything is also a struggle. And when you're exhausted, it's really hard to say, I need you to take the baby or for that other person who's trying to keep everything else running to see exactly what you need in that time and jump in to provide it. Well, the exhaustion, I think, is a good point because it's hard.

12:00You can't find the time to even have the conversation about how do we equitably share the workload here and workload meaning home and work and all of that. Jennifer, I'm curious, how often do couples actually have those conversations either before they have children or soon after? It's a really good question. So I think very few couples have those full conversations before, partly because we don't think of it and partly because it's very difficult to imagine what it's going to be like until that baby arrives. You can read all the parenting books in the world, but until the rubber hits the road, you know, you just don't know.

12:44But I think what happens is two things. We're either having those at sort of four o 'clock in the morning emergency when temper's afraid, which is not going to go anywhere, or we just let it go. And I think Rebecca's right. It's kind of been working, but there's also the sense that it becomes the default. This is what we've done for the first three months. So we carry on a little bit without questioning until it becomes very clear. It's not working. And then there's that sort of crisis point. And how do we rewind? What are some of the tools, Jen, that you recommend, you know, a couple in this first phase actually employ to get through it?

13:24Yeah. So I think when we're in the phase that Rebecca's in, and I remember it's a long time ago for me, but I remember when my two kids were at that age, we tend to really focus on the practicalities. And of course it's important, right? Who's on duty tonight, who picks them up from the crash, whatever that happens to be. But I found with the couples in my research, the most important thing is to really rewind the basics and look at how are we managing this as a couple almost at the psychological level. And Rebecca, I was really struck by your email where, you know, your husband's clearly a good guy, right?

13:57He has good intentions, but it's a little bit more at the level of, okay, whose career is most important? Who has the power? How do we support each other? And certainly what I found in my research is if we figure those sort of foundational things out, the practicalities become a little clearer, right? Because the deal we have is clearer. And I think unless we figure that out, you can work on the practicalities all you like, but you keep bumping into the same issue, which is, you know, whose responsibility is it? Who has the power? Why is it always me? You can't fix those things by just working out a schedule.

14:35That's a kind of discomforting conversation to have though, isn't it? How do you do it, Jen? It can be a discomforting conversation, I think, particularly when you see it as a conversation, right? We're going to sit down.

15:10Jennifer Petriglieri:required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Tonight, and we're going to figure it all out.

15:47I mean, that's a really tall order. And I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone doing that, even with a big bottle of wine. That's not going to happen. I think this is about a series of conversations. And really starting off on the baseline is what is important to us individually and also as a couple. So I think in Rebecca's situation, the sort of two conversations to start with, which is maybe thinking of the next five years. And I always think that's a good time period, especially with small children, because you can kind of imagine your one-year-old going to six, but it's hard to imagine them going to 11, right?

16:23You know, 10 years feels a long time. Five years is a good time period because it's long enough that we can really make some transitions in our family and in our career, but it's not so far out that we can't imagine what it's like. And really sitting down and saying, what is important to us in the next five years individually and as a couple. And that includes professional goals. It includes what kind of family do we want to build? And the thing that we often miss at this stage when our children are little is the things for us, right? What's the two or three things that are really important for me?

16:53And that's a great starting conversation because you don't need to agree anything, right? It's just understanding and building a mutual understanding of who wants what. And that really should be the foundation for all the decisions you're going to make from there on in. Yeah. Rebecca, did you and your husband have any of those conversations about expectations or how to divide things up? We did before we got engaged when we were sort of in the process of building a life together. And then we didn't really talk about it again. So as life really started taking off and this was, I mean, he had basically just graduated from law school.

17:43I, at the time, was thinking that I wanted to go to medical school and decided not to. But then we jumped into actual careers that kind of have minds of their own, right, when it comes to development, and had children. And we haven't really revisited those conversations, like you said, Amy, because you're exhausted. How do you find that time? And it's either at 4 a.m. when you're losing your mind, which is not productive, or it just doesn't happen and you end up just seething at one another, or it pops out at odd moments. Yeah. So Jen, how would you suggest Rebecca handle this? I think super practically, first of all, break those conversations down into snippets.

18:28So you don't need four hours, you need a series of 20 minutes. We can find 20 minutes, right? The kids go to bed relatively early, right? The kids are in bed. We put our phones down immediately. We sit down with a cup of tea. We'd say, okay, the next 20 minutes, we're just going to talk about this. And I think that first conversation is really just building mutual understanding. What do we both want? I love what you said, Rebecca, because I think we all do this, right? The early days, we talk about all these things and then it goes under the wayside. And of course, what we want changes, right?

19:00This is very normal. So I imagine even that conversation, both you and your husband will probably be surprised by what you hear. There'll be some things that just stay constant and other things you're like, wow, I didn't realize that actually. And that's just a really important point to start. So that's the first 20 minute conversation. Then maybe the next week you have another conversation around, okay, given that, let's look at our careers vis-a-vis each other and whose career is going to take priority, if anyone's, and have the career conversation, right? What are we going to do to manage our careers side by side?

19:31And then the next week we start thinking, okay, given that, what are some of the practicalities? One of the things that often creates tension at this stage. We have this sense that our careers are kind of 50-50 on equal footing.

20:08Jennifer Petriglieri:Plus. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. But very often then our parenting is not co-parenting, right?

20:45The lion's share falls on typically the woman. And this is just not sustainable, right? If we have 50-50 careers, we need 50-50 parenting. And sort of building light up like that makes those issues become very clear what the crux is and it makes us able to tackle it. So I would say like bite-sized chunks, 20-minute goes, I'm sure you'll be able to fit that into your schedule. I love that. Well, and I think even toasting with your tea at the beginning of that conversation, we got the kids to bed. Something that sets up we're in this together, because if I think about what would make me nervous about that conversation, is that most of us aren't skilled in having tense conversations or difficult conversations with our spouses or with anyone.

21:31And so I would be worried, speaking from experience, that it would be sort of an airing of resentments as opposed to a collaborative conversation. So like, how do you set it up so it's productive, not contentious? But I think you need to check that assumption, Amy. Okay. Because I think sometimes it's our assumptions that get us into trouble. Oh, my God, this is a big deal and I'm really tense. The conversation will be tense if you go in this way. And I think particularly if you start with what are you excited about? What are your goals for the next five years? There's nothing contentious in that conversation.

22:06And then you're developing the method of talking to each other. And then next time, maybe you touch on something a little bit more difficult, right? Okay, so how are we going to figure out our careers next to each other? And then you sort of work up to the more contentious stuff. But by the time you've done that, you'll be in the habit, right, of having these conversations. So the tension is sort of popped out of it. Jen, you recommend that before couples get into the practical matters, that they discuss the underlying issues, the psychological forces, the assumptions, all of the stuff that we've been talking about here.

22:42Can you say why that's important? Because it's about the symptom versus the cause. The practical issues are always the symptom. You know, if you're fighting about who's buying the milk, it's never about the milk. And I think we all know that it's not about the milk. It's not about who does pick up. It's about who has the power, who gets to decide, whose schedule is respected. And, you know, you can do all sorts of Google Calendar Sinks or schedules around who does shopping. It's not going to solve those issues. And that's why it's really important to get down to basics. And what I find, and I'm sure Rebecca, you'll find this as well, because it sounds like your husband has great intentions, is when you start having those conversations, a lot of what is going on is misunderstanding as opposed to misalignment.

23:33I find it hard to believe, and I'm sure Rebecca doesn't believe either, that her husband is kind of trying to get her to do everything or doesn't care. He doesn't sound like that sort of guy, right? It's just there's some misunderstanding where you're sort of passing past each other. and building that mutual understanding just goes a whole way and you can build the practicalities on top of that. I think about the Brene Brown advice around using the phrase the story I'm telling myself. I see you. I see you nodding, Rebecca. Have you used that? I used that. Tell us how. So I had this discussion with my husband and I said, I want to know what is going on in your head when you see me working past five or dialing in after the kids have gone to bed to catch up on something.

24:21I want to know what's going on in your head because the story I'm telling myself is that you don't think I should be doing this, that you don't think I should be putting in the work to gear up for this promotion that I'm working toward. And I told him that I was worried that part of it was internalized misogyny that we all may struggle with on occasion. So he said, what's going through my head is, I don't think they're paying you enough for this. I don't think they're appreciating you enough for this. Interesting. That's very different than... And you're wasting your time. You're a woman. You should stop.

25:09Right. Yes. On my side, it's I've had a long day. I went to the grocery store on my lunch hour. So I'm trying to catch up now so that we can have some family time before we wrestle the children into bed. And now you are grumbling at me about working late, which doesn't help. So understanding where he's coming from with that makes a huge, huge difference. Well, because what I hear in his response is that he cares about you, right? He cares about you and he cares about your career and you not being taken advantage of, which is very different than I care about me and the fact that you're working late is inconvenient to me, which is my interpretation, too, to be fair.

25:52And I think that goes, Jen, to your point about misunderstanding versus misalignment. Yeah. And I have a question, if I may, Rebecca. In an ideal world, what support would you like from him? If he could do two or three things a week, what would be like that? Oh, my goodness. If these were the two or three things you could do, that would be brilliant. Do you have a sense of what they are, like what you need? I think I'm not going to speak for everyone experiencing this first transition or every couple with small children, but connection, finding time for connection is so tough. So reaching out and saying, I know you're going through this big thing at work.